7.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
In 17th century England, torn by civil war, the Puritans appoint a "Witchfinder General" with the legal authority to hunt down suspected witches with the help of a henchman. When he is on the trail of one suspected witch, a young girl he has raped, her fiance, a Royalist, decides to give chase and hunt them down.
Starring: Vincent Price, Ian Ogilvy, Rupert Davies, Patrick Wymark, Wilfrid BrambellHorror | 100% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Biography | Insignificant |
History | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
English
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Note: This film is currently available as part of The Vincent Price Collection.
Shout! Factory’s Scream Factory imprint is giving horror fans a little early Halloween present this year, bringing six classic
Vincent Price – American International films to high definition for the first time. Though horror tends to be a genre that,
to
paraphrase one Rodney Dangerfield, “gets no respect”, and indeed probably all of these films were thought of as B-
movie
drive in fodder back in the day, most if not all of them hold up surprisingly well today, with several of them offering a
quasi-
hallucinatory quality which Roger Corman, the supposedly low rent auteur who is responsible for the majority of
the
offerings in this set, states was a deliberate choice (not one necessitated by relatively paltry budgets) in an attempt to
viscerally recreate the inner life of the (perhaps troubled) mind. Though Price had made at least a couple of forays into
horror in the fifties with such fare as
House of Wax 3D and The Fly
,
it was really the American International pictures that established Price’s “second act” in the film business, offering him
more or less steady employment when many of his contemporaries had either resigned themselves to the ostensibly
less
glamorous world of television or who had outright retired from show business.
Witchfinder General is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC
encoded
1080p transfer in 1.85:1. While things generally look quite good here, my sense is that some of the variances in image
quality must be traceable back to the fact that this may have been cobbled together from different versions of the film.
Reeves
tends to shoot a lot of the sylvan outdoor material with a glistening soft focus ambience, but even some of the "normal"
footage looks fairly soft here, and in fact there are some fairly radical differences that accrue between shots, again perhaps
traceable to different source elements. One quite noticeable one occurs at around 1:03:00 when an indoor scene with Price
is noticeably softer and grainier than what has just come before (this is but one example). While overall the color scheme is
accurate looking and generally well saturated, there are minute fluctuations and density variances creating some quasi-
flicker which eagle eyed viewers will notice. Though this isn't a transfer issue per se, some of the day for night
sequences offer low contrast that bathe the image in a pretty muddy appearance. All of this said, taken as a whole,
Witchfinder General looks pretty amazing on Blu-ray, especially considering the slicing and dicing it underwent for
various markets. Therefore, if I had the ability to, I might knock this up to around a 3.75, even though there are a few
issues to be aware of. Fans of the film should be very well pleased with this transfer, despite some occasional hiccups.
My colleague Dr. Svet Atanasov reviewed the British Blu-ray release of this film, and some may want to do a little "comparison shopping" of
screenshots.
Witchfinder General features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix presented via DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. The film is notable for its rather evocative Paul Ferris score, one which has a certain folksong like quality whose main theme presages Georges Delerue's score for Anne of the Thousand Days which came out a couple of years after this film. Dialogue is cleanly presented, and the track has no damage issues to report. Once again, fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is bolstered by lots (and lots) of screaming.
Witchfinder General is tonally quite different than most of the other films in this set, but in some ways it's actually the most disturbing. While the history here may or may not be completely accurate, there's an overriding feeling of claustrophobia and menace emanating from the film, and Price is simply unforgettable in a very unusual role. This Blu-ray offers generally excellent video (with an understanding of the film's history and issues with the various versions) and audio and comes with some great supplements. Highly recommended.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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